The Risen

Friday, April 01, 2011

From The Text: Ego-Mind, Simulate Self, & Authentic Self

Mandelbrot Image by Paul Nylander

From The Risen:

The ego-mind is an obsessively opinionated, decision-making psychological component of the earthly mind-body. All thought arises from its mentality, generated to manifest physical forms and experiences on the material plane. Simultaneously, it outwardly projects judgments about our mind-body’s perceptions and its environment into our inner space, and onto the bodies and environments of others. This projection is the simulate self. When the feeling of Authentic Self has awakened, all thoughts can be observed, accepted, shelved, or dissolved from a consciously aware stance. But until then, the ego-mind is in complete control of any rising thoughts.
The language of a malfunctioning ego-mind is tribal and therefore fear-based. It subscribes to judgmental concepts that use words and phrases such as “exclusive,” “special,” “restricted,” “fashionable,” “better than/less than,” “best/worst,” “superior/inferior,” “evolved/degenerate,” “elite/common,” “chosen/damned,” and “new and improved.” Gossip, complaint, and criticism are its food and drink. It is motivated by fame and recognition, and fueled by envy and competition. Insatiably seeking entertainment, “gleeful” and “gloating” best describe its sense of humor, which is delivered with jealousy, sarcasm, and resentment. The ego-mind loves competitive contests. It enjoys attracting and manifesting disasters.

The ego-mind is future-oriented—it cannot wait, and it worries. It worries about worry. Its language, couched in suggestions, generates anxiety attacks. The ego-mind will seize upon the body’s minor aches and escalate them into mental terrors and fantasies about disease and death.
The ego-mind prefers to begin speaking with “I think” and “I believe.” It developed the ritualized practices of “say please and thank you” and “I told you so.” Co-conspiring ego-minds are responsible for the inventions of money, business, politics, capitalism, socialism, spectator sports, organized religion and other forms of war games; journalism, art criticism, bumper stickers, body dysmorphia, racism, sexism, homophobia, genderphobia; so-called “reality” shows and other Nazi-like experiments; as well as the destruction of the rain forests. The Internet has been co-opted almost entirely by simulate selves. The collective ego-mind’s greatest desire is to achieve a Global Madison Avenue.

Awakened Authentic Self, while outwardly aware of these insane aspects of the simulated world around it, remains inwardly undisturbed and at peace.

Few earth-embodied Authentic Selves are consciously aware of the psychological component of their mind-body-spirit, also called the psyche or soul. The vast majority of people are moving about in the world with the ego-mind in the driving seat while they sleep in the back, occasionally and briefly waking to look at the scenery passing them by, but then quickly falling back into hibernation. The ego-mind’s driving is compulsive, habitual, and irrational—it’s mad as a hatter. Its ever-increasing neuroticism is generally uncontrollable because of our ignorant somnambulance. As a species, we have relegated it to our underconscious, from where it secretly dictates most, if not all, of our mental direction. In other words, it completely controls our world.

The ego-mind’s development began very soon after the dawning of human consciousness, and so is the most ancient source of human-generated deities. A more detailed etiology of the ego-mind and the simulate self will be presented further on.

Because of the unlimited energy permitted to the ego-mind, the simulate self is able to present and maintain the semblance of a self-aware consciousness. In effect, this simulacrum or imitation manifests its own kind of form, and simultaneously, a projected, perceived environment for this form. This environment arises from the multitude of anxious thoughts we allow the ego-mind to generate and amplify, drawing from the vast expanses of energy circumscribed by our fear and trembling.

The simulate self resides in our material body’s mental areas. The core, true self, or Authentic Self, dwells within the non-mental areas of our interpenetrating material, etheric, and astral bodies. Although the ego-mind is always seeking to condition us, Authentic Self does not seek to condition, nor can It be conditioned.

Authentic Self does not think or have thoughts. It observes them as they arise from the ego-mind, which is contained within the infinite space of Mind. Mind is also imagination, an aspect which is neutral until activated by a particular emotion or thought. As unaware beings whose lives are dictated by the ego-mind, we sustain the false belief that it is Authentic Self. This grants the ego-mind the power to rule our body, our imagination, our environment, and our life by its thinking and in any way it so chooses.

A perceived projection is a presumption of reality, giving rise within the mind of the ego to the illusions it thinks we should experience as “the world.” Thus, “the ten thousand things” of this manifested world are projected and named by the ego-mind. It will unfailingly and skillfully use the illusion of any form of presumed, perceived loss—grief, fear, sadness, anger, regret, anxiety, nostalgia—to keep us from connecting with and awakening to true, present reality. Awareness of our immortal existence—our true presence—within an infinite universe of experience reveals that “loss” is only a thought, an idea with no base in authentic reality whatsoever.

... Why is it so crucial to become consciously aware of the many identities and voices of the ego-mind? First, and as stated at the beginning of this chapter, the Risen are presenting this material to help begin the process of correcting the ego-mind process, in order to communicate with the Risen. Until we can become familiar with these false inner gods and their agendas and methods, we will be unable to determine with confidence when a voice actually belongs to a Risen One. If we want to have conversations with the Risen, we must be able to at least temporarily silence the voices of the simulate selves. Second, until we become aware of the ego-mind’s lies about death, which keep us fettered to fear, and of our hidden beliefs that make us co-conspirators with it, we will have little chance of ever connecting with our Authentic Self, and then with the greater authentic reality of the Risen.

"Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ' many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.-- (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 26)

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"Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
-- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

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"The instrument of thought, which has produced this world that does not work properly, is no longer valid. So perhaps this instrument of thought is worn out. Is there another instrument we can use?" -- Krishnamurti

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"...Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly."
-- Alfred North Whitehead - English mathematician & philosopher (1861-1947)___________________________________

". . . keeping the Risen concept of weaving in mind, perhaps at this point it can be sensed that what we have before us, from which we are inseparable and as reflected in this book, is a Supreme Tapestry. There appears to be a Very Grand Design which we all follow, either in awareness
or not, co-creatively or not -- recalling that creative means fun. As we weave we are free to make it up as we go along in any way we please, simultaneously staying within the Grand Design as imagined by Higher Imaginals, of whom we an inseparable part. The Grand Design is a work of perfections intermingled with imperfections, solutions with mistakes, and stillness within movement. The Higher Imaginals are many things, but for our purposes here, it suffices to say that they are very advanced and evolved individuals, or Higher Selves."
(from The Risen: Dialogues of Love, Grief & Survival Beyond Death; Chapter 13, Mundus Imaginalis, p. 165).